This is the first in a series of posts about a March 14, 2016 court hearing pertaining to reciprocal restraining orders Kim Duclos and I had recently petitioned for. In addition to lying to the police on Feb. 26, 2016 about a nonexistent episode of harassment to trigger this whole mess and lying on a restraining-order petition the following Monday (Feb. 29, 2016), Kim lied repeatedly before a judge in court at the hearing (I think there’s a word for that) and has been periodically lying about both the nature of the hearing itself and events addressed in the hearing. She has also continued to hector my friends as well as attempt to interfere with my personal and business life. Ergo, this series of posts, which will reveal even more forcefully what a sociopathic and malevolent liar Kim Duclos is.

Moreover, Kim Duclos is a criminal. Lying to the police, on court paperwork, and in a court hearing itself are crimes, especially when you do make up these stories to try to get someone in trouble. As you’ll see throughout these posts, Kim has the personal ethics of a starving, drunken hyena. I want to emphasize this because of Kim’s frantic and throaty insistence that I’m a dangerous scofflaw myself.

The audio clips were generated using Audacity and taken from the official .TRM files supplied to me by Boulder District Court. The audio itself has not been altered in any way. The hearing took place from 1:21 p.m. to 3:39 p.m. MST.

I’m starting in the middle because overall, this makes the most sense. This clip starts at 2:40 p.m., about halfway through the entire charade. Here, Kim’s lawyer asks her to explain what kicked off our coach-athlete relationship.

Before giving this a listen, bear in mind that Kim at various times since this court proceeding has declared that I never coached her at all. Here’s one example, an e-mail she sent to USATF-New England in early June of this year.

This message, sent in reference to an interview Kim gave without my knowledge in December 2009 or January 2010, actually includes numerous lies, at least one of which could get her sued. But for now, focus on the “I have never had any connection to Beck” part, which is ludicrous even by the standards of Kim’s unrestrained dissembling. This is someone who has repeatedly referred to me as an abusive coach, a drunken coach, a failed coach, et cetera (and by the way, we’ve only been in the same room three times not including this court appearance, never alone and never when anyone was drinking, unless Kim herself was sneaking a few nips).

Inthis 3-minute, 37-second MP3 clip, Kim gives her version of events. I will describe what she says and intersperse commentary, but will reserve my most pointed editorializing until the end of the post.Kim says that I “allegedly” knew about her race results and pictures going back to 2001, before she joined the Central Mass Striders. She says I became her Facebook friend in or around 2008 and soon started “infiltrating” conversations on her Facebook wall. She says that after she was laid off (which according to what she told me is not actually the means by which she lost that job), she had more time to train and needed “extra cash” to supplement her unemployment income, and began to therefore see running as a means to a financial end. (All of this is garbage. Kim had been traveling to races like the L.A. Marathon and Twin Cities Marathon in search of “extra cash” well before she contacted me.)

She claims that someone in CMS urged her to seek my coaching but cautioned her to not let me get involved with her personal life (pardon me while I lean over and puke into a massive cistern). Kim says that she didn’t actually want me to coach her because of things she’d supposedly heard about me, but claims that her CMS friend talked her into it. This was in October 2009.

She then says that she followed a plan I gave her for about six weeks, and that she paid for this, but that I continued sending her “free” plans she wanted nothing to do with. She then skips forward in time almost a year to the 2010 Chicago Marathon, which she says she dropped out of at the 5K point owing to back spasms she attributes here to “a deficiency” (she doesn’t say what kind). She said that she hadn’t been doing the training plans I was still sending her, as if I had just washed up in her life out of the blue and wasn’t continuing to supply her with plans she specifically wanted even though she could not or would not pay for them. (She paid me $80 twice at the end of 2009, not a cent thereafter, but I had taken her on as a charity case and didn’t expect payment.) She says “running kind of went away” at that point. She adds “I took a few years off, because I wasn’t feeling so hot” — another blatant lie.

She says that she got back in touch with me in “maybe 2013” and says that she didn’t notice anything horrible at the time and that it still seemed safe to contact me. (Why it wouldn’t have been safe, or what sort of horrors she might have expected, she doesn’t say or even hint at. Why she wanted me as her coach again despite having done nothing but shove unwanted free plans at her the first time also goes unexplored here.) She says I sent her a plan that had really high mileage and that she was so aghast that she didn’t pay for it and didn’t follow it. She says she “cut [me] off” and that “that’s when things started to get…bad.”

Things get truly insane at this point, and it’s too bad I can’t include a video of how the judge and everyone else in the room (me, Lize, Kim’s partner Sean, a bailiff, and the stenographer, as I recall). Kim claims that in response to her “cutting me off,” I started sending her friends threatening messages on Facebook…while posing as Kim Duclos. In these messages, I, pretending to be Kim, was supposedly planning to wreak havoc in her life by assuring she could never run for a professional club and so on. She says there were a lot of these messages, but that she never actually saw them, she only heard about them. (It seemed at this stage that her lawyer was trying to steer her in the direction of shutting up.)

Here’s the actual story, which is little more than a recap of what’s here. I joined CMS at the end of 1997 and was the newsletter editor for about 2 1/2 years. I continued following CMS race results and remained a member of the club even after I moved away from New England; I ran the USATF 50K champs in 2004 and the 2007 Groton 10K as a member of CMS. I had lots of longtime friends who were still principal figures in the club. So yeah, I had heard of Kim. I recognized her working a booth at the 2009 Boston Marathon expo and introduced myself to her. (At some point along the way, Kim ran for the Boston Athletic Association, not CMS, but I don’t know when exactly she left and returned.) We were in fact Facebook friends at that point, something I think I initiated. But I never offered to coach her or even made noises about being a coach. She contacted me cold about six months after that expo and asked if I was still coaching people. We discussed her goals and based on her various limitations, I offered her a discounted rate of $80 a month. She honored this for the first two months. Already a 2:44:32 marathoner, she made rapid improvements after a few tweaks I made — adjustments any half-observant coach would have suggested. Kim then ran a slew of personal records and qualified for the Olympic Trials in March 2010 with a 2:41:57 in Los Angeles, over two minutes under the standard. (The 2:38:21 she ran in December 2009 was shortly before the qualifying window opened.) Along the way I got her into the elite field of a midnight four-miler in New York City and also found her lodging for that event at the home of someone else I was coaching at the time. (Kim has since tried to get the author of that blog entry to remove it. This did not go well.)

That spring, I introduced Kim to a friend of mine who was living in Wellesley at the time and planning to soon move to Bloomington, Indiana to be closer to her family. Kim, coincidentally, was eager to get as close to Terre Haute, Indiana as possible because a man she’d had a fling of sorts with in Worcester had recently moved there for graduate school. Bloomington and Terre Haute are about an hour apart. In a move I regret to this day, I suggested that Kim — ever in need of “spare cash” — coach my friend, who was getting back into running (and had asked if I would coach her myself), and that they make the move to Indiana together. This happened in August 2010. After the move, things didn’t go in the direction Kim wanted them to with her would-be beau, and her response was to refuse to do the workouts I suggested. She went incommunicado after tuning up for Chicago by winning this race, until texting me the night before to say “My back just went.” She never contacted me to explain what happened or why she’d decided to rebel against the training that had gotten her the results she’d achieved in late 2009 and earlier in 2010. Soon, she blocked me on Facebook. I wasn’t altogether surprised given how I knew she’d treated various others over time, but it was still cause for a lot of scorn. After all, Kim was completely lazy and helpless in every aspect of her life other than actually running.

In addition to not charging her, I had gotten her elite entries into races, assembled her athletic resume, added her as a coach to my coaching site, and gotten her an agent (whom she summarily shitcanned when she realized that agents don’t work for free).

Kim says that she took a few years away from from running after dropping out of Chicago. This is a lie. About six months after the 1:19:04 half that preceded her Chicago DNF and the end of our “round one,” she raced a half-marathon. 10 months later, after missing the Olympic Trials, she ran several more races. She continued to compete when I wasn’t coaching her — just not as well.

Kim got back in touch with me in June 2013 asking for another chance. I granted it, but this time I told her she’d have to pay. She promised many times over the next few months to do so and did not.

Over the course of the next six months, I heard a great deal of complaints from Kim, having fled Indiana for Iowa, about her relationship with the guy she’d hooked up with. Trying to get her to talk about running was impossible and generated increasing amounts of hostility. In January I finally told her that if she couldn’t at least send me training summaries, we were done. The next day she jumped into my Facebook comments to exclaim that I was wasting my life on social media and needed to do better. I was finally tired of her bullshit — the “second chance” had long since become a joke — so I unfriended and blocked her. This triggered a storm of lies from her on her Facebook timeline about me being on a bender and attacking and threatening her, yada yada yada. I told her that if she did not delete this stuff, I would pass along the hateful things she had said about certain CMS people in our Hangouts chats. She refused. I did as promised and sent people copies of the chats. The degree of hate she had leveled at certain individuals for the high crime of simply trying to help her with her life, at her own request, is almost unfathomable.

All of this reminds me of what an unmitigated piece of trash Kim is. Lying and attacking people is bad enough. Being an ingrate toward people who have helped you without any expectation of material compensation is bad enough. Attacking the very people who have tried to help you, along with others in their orbit, is the mark of someone who is irretrievably damaged and deserving of unrelenting push-back.

Anyway, to sum up: In her answers to her lawyer, Kim said she asked me to coach her, gave up on the idea after six weeks, and ignored my annoying training plans for about a year before hurting her back and cutting me off. She managed to neatly elide running a bunch of personal bests, qualifying for the Olympic Trials, me finding her someone to live with so that she could stop squatting in an old family home in Worcester, and more.

In her description of the 2013-2014 coaching stint, she doesn’t bother weaving even a half-assed tale. Instead, she says she asked me to coach her and then was so aghast that the training resembled training that she refused to do it. It’s kind of funny that someone who started a shitblog called “140 miles at a time” (see my replicated version of this now-deleted creation here) pretended to be upset that a plan that included high mileage — and at first, the 2013 plan actually didn’t include high mileage because I knew she hadn’t been running at all.

Regarding her grousing that I threatened to ruin her chances of running professionally, be aware that when all of this was supposedly going on, at the start of 2014, Kim was almost four years removed from any kind of serious race results. She wouldn’t have been a candidate for the Hansons or any other team environment she had previously made noises about. She was done and plainly sensed that her focus was gone (a lot of the details she disclosed about her current relationship shed considerable light on this reality) and, being someone who always, always blames other people for things she fucks up or simply don’t work out, she made me a target and has never really stopped.

The next installment of this series will focus on Kim’s description of accusing another CMS runner of cheating to win an ultramarathon that this runner did not even finish. This babble-stream is even more fucked up than the stuff here, believe it or not.

Doc Bushwell is busy with other activities but continues to lend a moniker to this backwater of a blog. Jim is an engineering professor with a fondness for running shoes and drumsticks; and Kevin Beck is a self-exiled member of the clan who refuses to stay gone.